media practices

Over the four years of its implementation, special military operation has become a crucial factor influencing not only political, economic, technological, and purely military processes, but also the daily lives of citizens of Russia and Ukraine. Despite the fact that the conflct has lasted longer than, for example, the Great Patriotic War, not all of its aspects have received sufficient scholarly attention. One such issue is the attitude of Russian youth toward the special operation.

Despite the considerable attention paid to the attitude of young people towards special military operation (hereinafter referred to as SMO), the role of mass media in shaping the attitudes of this age group is not analyzed very often. Meanwhile, this is precisely what largely determines how young people perceive what is happening. In this regard, the aim of the study, the results of which are presented in this article, was to identify the dynamics of young people’s attitudes towards SMO in the context of their inherent media practices.

The object of this research were representatives of so-called “digital” generation of Russian youth (people born in the fi rst decade of the 21st century), and the subject was media practices common among them. Despite the fact that within Russian scholarship, quite a lot of attention is traditionally paid to the problems of media consumption by young people, various aspects of political dimension of the formats of interaction with the media widely spread among young people are rarely in the focus of attention of scholars.

The article presents results of a study of young people’s attitude towards the Special Military Operation (hereinafter – the SMO). Data from monthly measurements carried out from March 2022 to January 2024 by Levada Center (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), as well as the results of two online surveys (n = 2872) and a series of focus group interviews of young people (n = 74) conducted in November 2022 and November 2023 by employees of the Department of Political Science of Saratov State University are analyzed.

According to social surveys, the majority of Russian society as a whole supported the President’s decision to hold the special military operation (in what follows, the SMO). However, the level of this support appeared to be diff erent for diff erent social groups. It turned out, for example, that, compared with society in general, young people perceived the outbreak of hostilities more skeptical and critical. In this regard, this article is devoted to the analysis of the features and factors of formation of such an attitude of young people towards the SMO.